What do you mean by production ready? There are people who think gentoo itself isn't production ready! If you're using it, it's production ready. :)

I guess as an update, yes, progress has slowed but packages are still being marked for ppc-macos and there was a new installer released recently. If you'd like to see more packages marked stable, please test packages and submit bug reports please.

Ok, so before I install, I want to be clear about what the advantage is.

The advantage is the time saved from not having to track down tons of dependencies (and dependencies of dependencies) each time you want to install some Unix tools on OS X. Not everything I want to install is supported by Portage yet, but even when that happens I haven't lost anything, since I would have had to install the software and dependencies myself anyway had Portage not been available.

BennyP wrote:

Gentoo allows me to use more up to date developer tools, correct? including GCC, glib, libtool, etc.

The developer tools supplied by Apple support a number of features that aren't available in the mainstream versions. In particular, standard GCC doesn't support Apple's "Objective C++," and I don't think things like Frameworks are supported by the mainstream developer tools. If you were to replace Apple's GCC with another one from Portage, you would lose the ability to compile many OS X programs.

As an example of how frustrating this might be, look at the GNUstep project. They're developing an awesome programming and user environment similar in many ways to OS X and it's predecessor, OpenSTEP. For a long time, there's been an interest using GNUstep to port Mozilla's Camino.app to GNU/Linux and BSD, but since mainstream GCC doesn't support Objective C++, it just isn't possible. And when GNUstep folks do frameworks, they have to use kludges like symbolic links and LD_LIBRARY_PATH settings to make up for the fact that Frameworks aren't supported by mainstream developer tools.

Until this changes, you really need to stick with Apple's tools when building software for OS X.